What he could do was take it apart and, after making a few adjustments, put it back together again. “I made it extremely fast,” Lucas said proudly.101 “I’d race around the orchard and spin out and smash it up.”102 Then he’d start all over again, hauling his car down to Foreign Car Service, a local garage that specialized in European cars, where he’d rebuild the Fiat, cutting off the roof and lowering the front windshield to a mere sliver, punching up the engine, installing a racing belt and roll bar, and tinkering with the suspension. Like Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon, Lucas’s Bianchina wouldn’t look like much, but it would have it where it counted—and he would make a lot of the special modifications himself.
In May 1960, George Lucas turned sixteen. There would be no more spinning out and smashing up the Bianchina in the walnut groves; now, said Lucas, “I could really drive around, out on the streets.”103 School, never a priority, was all but forgotten. “I wasn’t paying much attention at high school,” he admitted later. “I found it all pretty boring and spent all my free time working on my car.”104 From that point on, said Lucas, “cars were all-consuming to me.”105
As his grades suffered, Lucas began to look more and more like the juvenile delinquent his teachers were already convinced he was. The crew cut was grown out, and Lucas combed and greased his hair back in the style everyone called a “duck’s ass,” or sculpted his already wavy hair upward into a shiny California variation on the pompadour called the “breaker.” Lucas didn’t develop a lot of the bad habits typical of actual thugs—he wasn’t a drinker, and his biggest vice was gorging himself on Hershey bars—but he definitely looked the part, wearing unwashed Levi’s and pointy-toed boots with metal tips. At only five-foot-six, however, Lucas seemed more surly than intimidating—and John Plummer thought his friend simply looked lost, hanging out with “the undesirables and low-riders of [the] town.”106
By reputation alone, one of the biggest groups of “undesirables and low-riders” in Modesto were members of a car club known as the Faros. Their nightly objectives, as one member later described it, were simple: “girls, beer, and cars.”107 They were probably more swagger than threat—by their own admission there was little smoking or swearing—but they looked dangerous and could always find their share of trouble with rival gangs and car clubs. Lucas, who had already made a habit of befriending older and stronger protectors, hovered around the Faros, though more as a mascot than as a full-fledged member. “The only way to keep from getting the shit pounded out of you was to hang out with some really rough guys who happened to be your friends,” he said. Mostly, the Faros saw Lucas as the perfect decoy for churning up rival gangs, then luring them right into the Faros’ waiting fists. “They’d send me in and wait until somebody would try to pick a fight with me, then they would come in and pound ’em,” said Lucas. “I was the bait. I was always afraid I was gonna get pounded myself.”108
For Lucas, however, being out on the street was never about fighting. Having his own car meant two things: racing and cruising. And Modesto, with its streets laid out in long grids, was ideal for both. “[George] was addicted [to cruising], more than anyone, I think,” recalled Plummer.109 For Lucas, cruising was more than an addiction; it was “a very distinctive American mating ritual,” he said later. “[It’s] very unique because it’s all done in cars.”110
The ritual was elaborate but predictable: usually Lucas and his fellow cruisers would troll down Tenth Street—“dragging Tenth,” they called it—then cut one block east over to Eleventh Street, where they would cruise back up before cutting over to Tenth again, round and round all night. At times they’d park at the drive-in, order food, and move from car to car, blasting Buddy Holly or Chuck Berry, chatting through open windows or, if one got lucky, sliding into the backseat for a quick make-out session. It was a ritual that began to consume nearly all of Lucas’s waking hours. “[It] was the main entertainment, sort of just going around in circles chasing girls all night,” said Lucas. “You’d come in at four in the morning, get a couple hours of sleep, and go off to school.”111
Despite his regular efforts, however, Lucas didn’t actually catch that many girls. “I never really had any high school kind of girlfriends or anything,” he said. “I was always going around picking up girls and hoping for the best.”112 While he allegedly lost his virginity in the backseat of a car, he seemed to enjoy the chase—the ritual—more than the conquest.113 “Cruising is like fishing,” Lucas explained later. “Unless… you happen to catch a shark, there are no real great moments. Mostly it’s just sitting around talking, having a good time.… [O]ccasionally you get a fish, but it’s never that exciting.”114
What was exciting, though, was racing. With his souped-up Bianchina, Lucas was a force to be reckoned with on Modesto’s long straightaways; the little car was now built for speed, low and lightweight, with a driver who still weighed barely a hundred pounds. “George could drive ’em,” said Plummer admiringly. “He was really good at that.” Lucas loved gunning the engine then “peel[ing] rubber through all four gears with three shifts.… It was the thrill of doing something really well.”115 It was no wonder the Modesto police found him an easy target, issuing him so many speeding tickets that he eventually had to appear in court—and in a dreaded suit, no less.
After his immersion in the car scene, Lucas now knew what he wanted to do with his life. He didn’t just want to race on Modesto’s back roads; he wanted to drive a race car for a living. Unfortunately, California law prohibited him from officially racing until he reached the age of twenty-one. So Lucas made the rounds at northern California autocross events instead, putting his little Fiat through its paces on tightly controlled parking lot or airfield courses marked out with red cones. He even managed to win a few trophies, giving him bragging rights among the other car enthusiasts at the Foreign Car Service garage.
But there was an autocross driver at Foreign Car Service who was even better than Lucas, a fellow Modestan named Allen Grant, four years older than George, who seemed never to lose a race. Lucas, who loved speed, was impressed. “Since I was the fastest driver, George took a liking to me, and we became friends,” said Grant.116 In Grant, Lucas had found yet another big brother figure to whom he could attach himself. He joined Grant as his mechanic and, when needed, co-driver. As they leaned over the engine of Grant’s car, Lucas could quickly make Grant, and the rest of the Foreign Car Service crew, a bit crazy. “He was always jabbering… ‘What about this? And doing this?’” said Grant. “And you know, we didn’t take him very seriously. But we liked him.”117
The racing community gave Lucas some much-needed structure. It wasn’t school, but it was social, organized, and respectable in an underground way. Lucas joined the newly formed Ecurie AWOL Sports Car Competition Club—created almost solely so its members could compete at autocross—and edited its newsletter, writing its lead commentaries and filling its pages with drawings of cars. And he got his first real job, working as a mechanic at Foreign Car Service. He still looked like a greaser, but he was acting more like a professional grease monkey now, fixing cars, rebuilding engines, and acting as Grant’s pit crew at the races Grant seemed to win almost effortlessly.118
It wasn’t all cruising and racing, however. A car also gave Lucas “my own life,” he said—freedom to explore the world beyond Modesto.119 What he saw intrigued him. For one thing, there were art house cinemas showing films he’d never heard of, their marquees glowing with strange and glamorous titles like Les quatre cents coups or À bout de souffle, and directors with names that were exotic to him, like Truffaut and Godard. With their existential themes, social relevance, frequently jittery camera movement, and a self-awareness in which characters often directly addressed the audience, these and other films of the so-called French New Wave just felt different from any of the films Lucas had seen at Modesto’s Strand Theatre. “I loved the style of Godard’s films,” Lucas would say later. “The graphics, this sense of humor, the way he portrayed the world—h
e was very cinematic.”120 In 1962, Lucas couldn’t quite articulate what he thought of the cresting French New Wave films; he just knew that they were something very different from The Blob or Cinderfella.
Lucas and John Plummer were also making regular trips north to the Berkeley area to attend the recently founded Canyon Cinema, a “floating cinematheque” established by avant-garde filmmaker Brice Baillie and several other like-minded colleagues to showcase underground, experimental, and avant-garde films. Lucas had never seen anything like it. Baillie had set up the original Canyon Cinema in his Canyon, California, backyard, serving free popcorn and wine as he projected movies from his kitchen window onto an army surplus screen; at other times and locations, films might simply be projected onto sheets.121 While Baillie was promoting largely local filmmakers whose films had little chance of making it into theaters, films by foreign directors like Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Jonas Mekas often crept into the rotation as well. Lucas found them all interesting, but he liked the more avant-garde films best—“the ones that were more abstract in nature.”122 Lucas would drive back to Modesto in his Bianchina after a screening, head swimming with images and sounds.
His parents knew nothing of it—not of dragging Tenth all night, nor the autocross races with Allen Grant, nor the art films in San Francisco. “He just disappeared in the evenings,” said his sister Wendy.123 Lucas thought his father’s lack of interest in him was typical—and, looking back, probably understandable. “I was a hell raiser,” Lucas said. “I didn’t do very well in school. My father thought I was going to be an automobile mechanic, and that I wasn’t going to amount to anything.… My parents—not my mother, mothers never write off their sons—but my father wrote me off.”124
The powder keg of tension between father and son finally exploded when Lucas was eighteen. Both knew that the fuse had been lit and sputtering for a long time. Lucas, however, in addition to the long hair, bad grades, and nighttime disappearing act that already so irritated his father, hadn’t done himself any favors when he truculently, and briefly, went to work for George Sr. at L. M. Morris. Lucas hated dragging around gigantic boxes, sweeping the floors, cleaning the toilets. He even hated getting into his Bianchina to deliver packages. And so Lucas had quit—and his father was furious.
Lucas was furious too. “I got really mad at [my father] and told him, ‘I’ll never work in a job where I have to do the same thing over and over again every day,’ and he just didn’t want to hear that,” said Lucas. The argument was on. “He had worked very hard to be able to give this [family business] to me, and so for me to refuse it was a big deal,” Lucas said. “He thought that I would go off and starve to death as some kind of artist, living in a garret.”125
“You’ll be back in a few years,” George Sr. told his son knowingly.
“I’ll never be back,” Lucas shot back. “And as a matter of fact, I’m going to be a millionaire before I’m thirty!”126
Recalling their spat forty years later—well after he’d become one of the most successful and wealthy businessmen in the world—Lucas could only smile at the irony of telling off his own prosperous entrepreneur father, as well as his own surprising resolve. “We had this big break, when he wanted me to go into the business and I refused,” Lucas said in 1997. “And I told him, ‘There are two things I know for sure. One is that I will end up doing something with cars, and two, that I will never be president of a company.’ I guess I got outwitted.”127
For now, Lucas would only concede that he was willing to finish high school before leaving L. M. Morris, and maybe Modesto, behind for good. He and Plummer were already planning to spend the summer in Europe, perhaps heading for France to watch Le Mans, or to Germany, where they could roar down the autobahn without any regard for speed limits. After that, Lucas would go to art school—which earned another scowl of disapproval from his father and another round of arguments—or become a full-time mechanic or race car driver. But first he had to graduate from Thomas Downey High School—and as his June graduation date approached, even that was looking less and less likely. With only a few weeks left of school, Lucas was failing several classes—and with final exams looming, he still had three term papers to turn in. Flunking out was a very real possibility.
Then on June 12, 1962—a sweltering hot Tuesday—with his graduation only three days away, Lucas piled into his Bianchina with an armload of schoolbooks and headed for the library, about twenty minutes away, where he planned to spend the afternoon studying for finals and writing the papers that were still due. Predictably, it didn’t take him long to get bored, and at about 4:30 p.m. or so, Lucas climbed back into his little car and pointed it toward home. By 4:50 he was hurtling down Sylvan Road, with the dirt road entrance to the Lucas ranch coming up on his left. Lucas slowed the Bianchina to a crawl, then began to ease the little Fiat into a left turn.
Lucas neither saw nor heard the Chevy Impala, driven by seventeen-year-old Frank Ferreira, roaring up the road from the opposite direction. As Lucas turned across Sylvan, Ferreira’s Impala T-boned the little Fiat, hitting it fast and hard. The Bianchina rolled several times, then smashed into an enormous walnut tree, wrapping itself around the trunk in a mangled metal death grip. Lucas’s carefully juiced-up engine tumbled from the car’s shattered husk, dripping oil and radiator fluid onto the hard-baked Modesto soil.128
2
Geeks and Nerds
1962–1966
Inside the Lucas house, Dorothy Lucas heard the squeal of tires and the sickening sound of the Bianchina rolling and then crashing into the walnut tree. “For my parents, it was devastating, because it was right at the end of their road, and my mother heard it,” recalled Kate Lucas. “And she… went down to see what had happened.… It was her son.”1
The wreckage was terrible—a photograph of it would run on the front page of the Modesto Bee the next morning—but miraculously, Lucas wasn’t inside the car when it hurtled into the tree. As the Bianchina rolled for the third time, Lucas’s racing belt—the one he had so carefully installed himself, bolting it to the floor of the car with a thick metal plate—failed and snapped. He was flung clear of the car just before impact, landing on his chest and stomach with such force that he was immediately knocked unconscious. As he hit the ground, Lucas’s left scapula fractured and his lungs were bruised; his heart rate plummeted, and he went into shock. He had been hurt badly—but had his racing belt held, he would have been mangled and likely killed inside the Bianchina, which hit the walnut tree hard enough to leave it leaning at a forty-five-degree angle, roots torn and exposed.
An ambulance arrived, sirens blaring, and Lucas was rushed to Modesto City Hospital a short distance away. En route, Lucas’s color went from pale to blue, and he started to vomit blood. An open gash in his forehead continued to bleed, smearing blood across his face and staining his shirt collar crimson. It didn’t look good—and on Lucas’s arrival at the hospital, the facility’s ace diagnostician, Dr. Paul Carlsen, was hastily called in to determine the extent of his injuries. To Carlsen’s surprise, Lucas was actually in better shape than he looked; while there was some hemorrhaging from his bruised lungs, further testing showed no other internal bleeding. And apart from a few minor fractures, everything else was intact.
When Lucas awoke several hours later, he found himself in a hospital bed with an oxygen tube in his nose and several more tubes attached to a needle in his arm where he was receiving a blood transfusion. His mother, who had nearly fainted at the sight of his injuries, stood nearby with his sister Wendy. Groggily, Lucas could only ask, “Mom, did I do something wrong?” Dorothy Lucas burst into tears.2
Lucas’s smashed Fiat was dragged onto a flatbed truck and hauled off for junk. “Most of the kids at school thought I had died,” said Lucas later. “My car was this little mangled hulk that was driven down the main street where I cruised.… Everybody thought I’d been killed.”3 His teachers at Thomas Downey High School took pity on what they thought for certain was a
doomed young man. “All the teachers that were going to flunk me gave me a D,” said Lucas, “so I managed to get my diploma by virtue of the fact that everybody thought I was going to be dead in three weeks anyway.”4
Lucas would spend most of the next four months in bed, recuperating from his injuries. He did a lot of thinking—about the accident, about life, and about the universe and his place in it. It wasn’t lost on him that he’d been saved by the failure of the very racing belt he had installed to protect himself. “I realized more than anything else what a thin thread we hang on in life,” Lucas said, “and I really wanted to make something out of my life.” It was similar to the existential crisis he’d experienced at age six—What am I? How do I function in this, and what’s going on here?—only now it seemed he might finally be on his way to finding some answers. “I was in an accident that, in theory, no one could survive,” he said. “So it was like, ‘Well, I’m here, and every day now is an extra day. I’ve been given an extra day so I’ve got to make the most of it. And then the next day I began with two extra days.’… You can’t help in that situation but get into a mindset like that.… You’ve been given this gift and every single day is a gift. And I wanted to make the most of it.”5 It was, he said later, “like almost starting a new life.”6
George Lucas Page 4